This is some food for thoughts. In my case, I do not consider the subscription fees to my newsletters to reflect the value of my writing itself. In other words, they are not the prices of my paid-subscribers-only posts. From the way I see it, the fees convey the following message: if you like my work and want to support me financially, I believe this is how much you could afford. I 'sell' patronship, not bodies of text. Accordingly, I do not compare my prices to those of magazines or newspapers at all. We are selling totally different things.
I absolutely agree Hyun Woo, that the subscription fees don't represent the value of our writing, and that what we're doing (and especially what you're doing) is not really comparable to what newspapers are doing. I use newspapers - or, more generally, periodicals - as an example of a revenue model and technology that was designed to make the wide distribution of art and thought affordable and thus accessible that it might then also serve as a forum for public dialogue. Which they did for a while, supported by significantly less intrusive advertising - but that model has now been largely upended by the internet.
The question of what writing is *worth*, however, is also of interest to me. On the one hand, how does one put a price on truth or beauty? On the other hand, "the labourer is worthy of his hire", and thus patronage (of various types) of the arts and of writing has been a model for centuries (millennia, even), or, more recently, a sort of crowd-sourced patronage that is influenced by the law of supply and demand (i.e., published art and writing in the "free market"). Given the internet's (and now AI's) significant disruption of established models, in tension with the ever-present impulse for art and writing to be "free", I'm trying to think about what sort of funding alternatives (which naturally hook into questions of worth) are now available to artists and writers who, on the one hand, naturally want their art and writing to be viewed and read, and, on the other hand, would love to make some sort of living from their creative endeavours.
I rather like the ideal that I sort of stumbled upon in this piece, which posits micro-transactional crowd-sourcing of funding for work that people want to promote and support, especially as a potential partial replacement for the current intrusive ad-funded models - but I also support a return to the older "patronage" model by which those with larger amounts of disposable income use it to support those artists and writers and other content creators whose work they would like to further and/or promote.
I, too, have wrestled with this subject. I prefer free to the minimum, but folks, including myself, tend to consider free to be worthless. So, I took the minimum, but allowed access to nonpaying subscribers. It's too early to gage the results. So far I have no paid subscribers, but I have only published six post so far. I call my posts Toward a Christian Worldview, in which I am trying to gain a worldview that will never be complete, for my premise is that if you are searching for truth you must be willing to scrap whatever conclusions you reach when you find them untenable. So, the best I hope to do is settle on a few more or less permanent truths to keep yourself on track.
I suspect, judging from successful substacks, that folks like narrower views that are presented as concrete. That is what I hope to avoid, so I have to be resigned to never being successful. Certainty has gotten Christianity to the splintered shape we have been in for almost our whole existence.
I don't consider free to be worthless. I look at free primarily as a form of freedom, and only secondarily "free as in beer", and think that thoughts offered in public dialogue are worth a lot - much more, if true, than any arbitrary price we may put on them - and I think your intention to offer what looks like a sort of "Mere Christianity" of worldviews, from an Orthodox-informed perspective, is a potentially very worth-while endeavour. Free is more or less a necessary precursor to audience in the current internet model - unless you're bringing a ready-made audience with you, no one is going to pay for "a pig in a poke" (as they used to say).
One of the thing I love about Substack is that, with its emphasis on (even rewarding of) long-form writing, it allows for nuance in a way that much of the internet doesn't. So, you may be more successful here than you anticipate, if you're able to pull off what I think you're aiming for, even *with* nuance.
I think you are correct. Truth, though, can be very painful. It is painful for me to question organized Christianity. I grew up in it and absolutely love its beauty and majesty. And a life of servitude is not very appealing to consider. I would much prefer to stand on an upraised stage, in vestments, and maybe even a crown, and pontificate. To command attention and to gain a loyal following appeals to me. But, deep down, I know that it would not be good for me or to my audience. I am also aware that gaining an audience for my quest may not be in my future. Fame and fortune are not my goals. It is to hear, as this existence is being prepare for the furnace, Well done, my faithful servant.
This is some food for thoughts. In my case, I do not consider the subscription fees to my newsletters to reflect the value of my writing itself. In other words, they are not the prices of my paid-subscribers-only posts. From the way I see it, the fees convey the following message: if you like my work and want to support me financially, I believe this is how much you could afford. I 'sell' patronship, not bodies of text. Accordingly, I do not compare my prices to those of magazines or newspapers at all. We are selling totally different things.
I absolutely agree Hyun Woo, that the subscription fees don't represent the value of our writing, and that what we're doing (and especially what you're doing) is not really comparable to what newspapers are doing. I use newspapers - or, more generally, periodicals - as an example of a revenue model and technology that was designed to make the wide distribution of art and thought affordable and thus accessible that it might then also serve as a forum for public dialogue. Which they did for a while, supported by significantly less intrusive advertising - but that model has now been largely upended by the internet.
The question of what writing is *worth*, however, is also of interest to me. On the one hand, how does one put a price on truth or beauty? On the other hand, "the labourer is worthy of his hire", and thus patronage (of various types) of the arts and of writing has been a model for centuries (millennia, even), or, more recently, a sort of crowd-sourced patronage that is influenced by the law of supply and demand (i.e., published art and writing in the "free market"). Given the internet's (and now AI's) significant disruption of established models, in tension with the ever-present impulse for art and writing to be "free", I'm trying to think about what sort of funding alternatives (which naturally hook into questions of worth) are now available to artists and writers who, on the one hand, naturally want their art and writing to be viewed and read, and, on the other hand, would love to make some sort of living from their creative endeavours.
I rather like the ideal that I sort of stumbled upon in this piece, which posits micro-transactional crowd-sourcing of funding for work that people want to promote and support, especially as a potential partial replacement for the current intrusive ad-funded models - but I also support a return to the older "patronage" model by which those with larger amounts of disposable income use it to support those artists and writers and other content creators whose work they would like to further and/or promote.
I, too, have wrestled with this subject. I prefer free to the minimum, but folks, including myself, tend to consider free to be worthless. So, I took the minimum, but allowed access to nonpaying subscribers. It's too early to gage the results. So far I have no paid subscribers, but I have only published six post so far. I call my posts Toward a Christian Worldview, in which I am trying to gain a worldview that will never be complete, for my premise is that if you are searching for truth you must be willing to scrap whatever conclusions you reach when you find them untenable. So, the best I hope to do is settle on a few more or less permanent truths to keep yourself on track.
I suspect, judging from successful substacks, that folks like narrower views that are presented as concrete. That is what I hope to avoid, so I have to be resigned to never being successful. Certainty has gotten Christianity to the splintered shape we have been in for almost our whole existence.
I don't consider free to be worthless. I look at free primarily as a form of freedom, and only secondarily "free as in beer", and think that thoughts offered in public dialogue are worth a lot - much more, if true, than any arbitrary price we may put on them - and I think your intention to offer what looks like a sort of "Mere Christianity" of worldviews, from an Orthodox-informed perspective, is a potentially very worth-while endeavour. Free is more or less a necessary precursor to audience in the current internet model - unless you're bringing a ready-made audience with you, no one is going to pay for "a pig in a poke" (as they used to say).
One of the thing I love about Substack is that, with its emphasis on (even rewarding of) long-form writing, it allows for nuance in a way that much of the internet doesn't. So, you may be more successful here than you anticipate, if you're able to pull off what I think you're aiming for, even *with* nuance.
I think you are correct. Truth, though, can be very painful. It is painful for me to question organized Christianity. I grew up in it and absolutely love its beauty and majesty. And a life of servitude is not very appealing to consider. I would much prefer to stand on an upraised stage, in vestments, and maybe even a crown, and pontificate. To command attention and to gain a loyal following appeals to me. But, deep down, I know that it would not be good for me or to my audience. I am also aware that gaining an audience for my quest may not be in my future. Fame and fortune are not my goals. It is to hear, as this existence is being prepare for the furnace, Well done, my faithful servant.